Nick Cohen's Attack on Jonathan Gledhill and Alan Beith

Another article by Nick Cohen inspiring a blogpost - this time in the Spectator. Here’s how it starts:

If you want to hear a BBC discussion going hopelessly wrong, listen to the ‘debate’ between the Bishop of Lichfield, Jonathan Gledhill (brother of the better-known Ruth) and Alan Beith on the Today programme this morning. Radio 4 meant it to be about the established church, and set the Anglican bishop against the Methodist Beith.

Did they really? Methodists and Anglicans have been in Covenant since 2003. They are not arch-enemies out to slay one another. They work together ecumenically, share local churches together and support each other on a number of social issues. Also, Ruth Gledhill is not related to Jonathan Gledhill - an error that Ruth has pointed out on Twitter.

But a freemasonry of the faithful took over, and ‘balance’ went out of the window. Conformist and non-conformist united against their common enemy, ‘militant secularism’. Not just Anglicans and Methodists, Beith assured us, but Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and Hindus were at one in their fear of the secularist menace.

“Freemasonry”? An unfortunate term in this context. The first definition of freemasonry in the Oxford English Dictionary reads: “The system and institutions of the Freemasons.” Back in 1985 the Methodist Conference voted that Freemasonry competed with Christian beliefs. Cohen, however, would have meant the second definition of this term: “Instinctive sympathy or fellow feeling between people.” A less ambiguous choice of words would have been “a shared perspective”. The jumbled phrases continue through the paragraph with Cohen suggesting that Sir Beith says that Anglicans, Methodists, Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and Hindus are in “fear of the secularist menace”. He didn't say anything like this. In fact, Sir Beith stands up for the views of atheists, some of whom would agree with Mary Ann Sieghart's piece in the Independent this week.

‘It is bad enough having to put up with the platitudinous propaganda of Thought for the Day,’ I thought, ‘but this is too much.’

Thought for the Day takes up roughly one minute of scheduling time. It’s topical, features participants of different faiths and, I think, would be an even better slot if it featured humanists too. Why didn’t Cohen lay into the Sunday Programme, which lasts 45 minutes every week? Maybe he likes the Sunday Programme.

Jonathan Franzen, Kindles and Paperbacks

Reading damages society. That’s another way of saying that e-books damage society. This was the headline in today’s Telegraph online: “Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society”. Franzen isn’t actually quoted as saying this in the article, but what he is quoted as saying is enough to provoke a backlash:

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing. “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.

If you spilt water on your paperback, the ink might run (depending on the quality of the paperback). If it didn’t run, then it could start to fade. If your Kindle was damaged and had to be replaced, you wouldn’t lose your books because they’d be backed up electronically (on your Amazon account, for example). Still, I don’t think it’s helpful to pit e-books, hardbacks and paperbacks against one another, with one format emerging as the winner. They can compliment each other.

Franzen’s suggestion that e-books aren’t for “serious readers” isn’t really thought through. A student on her way to the library might want to read a novel on the bus and e-readers are small, fairly light to carry and take up hardly any space in a bag. For people who don’t have enough room in their home for a library, e-readers are a form of storage space. And there’s no need to lug the Oxford English Dictionary around with you either because the Kindle comes with a copy. If you wanted to know the meaning of a word, you just need to click on it with the cursor and the definition appears in the margin. Kindles are practical.

“Franzen said he took comfort from knowing he will not be here in 50 years’ time to find out if books have become obsolete… ‘Seriously,’ (he said) ‘the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don’t see how you could stand it psychologically.’”

If Franzen felt like getting away from it all on a remote island, he might want to think about slipping a Kindle into his backpack - provided there's electricity on the island, of course.

Lisbeth Salander and Feminism

I’ve come across Nick Cohen’s Guardian piece “Stieg Larsson was an extremist, not a feminist” too late to leave a comment, so I’ll leave one here. This is what made me want to make one – Cohen’s closing paragraph:

I do not go to actors for political advice. But when Rooney Mara said that she did not think that Larsson's Salander was a feminist, she was not the empty-headed celebrity she seemed.

Salander is not Erika Berger; she wouldn’t call herself a feminist. She’s not really keen on labelling herself as anything. One of the most important things to understand about Salander is the likelihood that she has a high functioning form of autism. Blomkvist thinks she has Asperger’s. Her way of relating to herself and everyone and everything around her is affected by her psychological make-up. It’s not enough to quote Eva Gabrielsson saying that Salander’s "entire being represents a resistance, an active resistance to the mechanisms that mean women don't advance in this world and in worst-case scenarios are abused like she was" without mentioning the probablity that she also has Asperger’s. It’s key to a reader’s understanding of how Salander thinks and how Larsson drew her as a character.

From Russia With Love

I’ve been immersing myself in Raymond Chandler novels recently, which probably accounts for this short blog post on the story about Ekaterina Zatuliveter who proved to a tribunal that she was not a honeytrapping spy from Russia sent to access defence secrets in the UK.

This is from the end of an article in Daily Mail online:

Their (the tribunal’s) ruling states: 'The picture painted by the diary entries is inconsistent with the Security Service's assessment that she was, most likely, tasked actively to pursue the offer of a relationship with Mr Hancock.

'The most likely explanation, and one which we find to be proved on the balance of probabilities, is that, however odd it might seem, she fell for him.'

Last night security officials insisted they were not in any way 'embarrassed' by the ruling and insisted their identification of Miss Zatuliveter as a potential threat to national security was correct.

The ruling said: 'We are satisfied that it is significantly more likely than not that she was and is not a Russian agent.'

However, it added: 'We cannot exclude the possibility that we have been gulled – but, if we have been, it has been by a supremely competent and rigorously trained operative.'

Right, so: “We don’t think you’re bluffing, but if you are we’ve called you on it anyway.”

Tori Amos; Cultural Olympiad; Review Show

Back from a pre-record of the Review Show for the Premier Radio Drive Time slot due to be aired at 4pm on 14 November. This followed a morning at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane for a press conference about the Cultural Olympiad (The Guardian was concerned about the cost of free cultural events during a time of recession; The Times wanted to know more about a major art installation by the Manhattan artists' collective YesYesNo which will span the length of Hadrian's Wall and The Telegraph wondered whether actors spouting Shakespeare along the walk from Westminster to the Southbank might be a bit too much for "grumpy Londoners" to take) - and an evening at the Hammersmith Apollo being blown away by Tori Amos (Suede; A Sorta Fairytale).

On the Review Show we discussed:

1) Film: Amélie (10 year anniversary dvd)
2) Book: Just Want To Be Loved for Me.
3) CD: Kingsway triple pack.

And here is a picture from inside the Theatre Royal today:

Quite.

Jack Clemo Poetry Awards

A poorly taken picture of Tony Jasper and Lady Mary Holborow at The Society of Authors yesterday:

The Arts Centre Group held their annual Jack Clemo Poetry Awards there.

House of Commons

Labour MP Meg Munn hosted an afternoon tea in celebration of the Methodist Recorder’s 150th anniversary year in the House of Commons yesterday. Here is a snap from inside Dining Room A:

Charles Dickens was writing Great Expectations and Queen Victoria was on the thrown when the first edition of the Recorder was published in 1861. After the Daily Telegraph, the paper was the oldest in Fleet Street and also one of the last to move out. The Methodist Recorder is now taking on the challenge of a digital age (I heard yesterday that its website will be revamped... soon).